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This bill seems reasonable according to the article? It allows the device to state the user is underage and the site must act accordingly rather than gating users to a site and must prove their age. But then again “the road to hell is paved with good intentions" so no clue how it’ll play out in reality.


This is almost an amazing thing. Some common top-level way to set parental controls across systems would be a godsend. That’s all a giant pile of time-wasting shit right now.

However, any system that just uses age is useless. They’re always excessively cautious, so you may as well just not provide access at all for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 or so, if that’s all you have.

No, block all + allow lists are still where it’s at. Please make those work better.

(If anyone knows the magic to make Minecraft [java] work with macOS allowlist-only network access, I’d love to know what it is. The fucking launcher wants to talk to a half-dozen bare IP addresses to work, and the addresses change seemingly every single launch, from a pool of what must be many hundreds, at least, it’s completely unusable)


How does the government mandating the way an operating system works seem reasonable?


It seems very reasonable to require a feature in an OS, like requiring seatbelts in a car. Of course, it depends on the feature though.


I could also mean that if you don’t have TPM on your computer and the OS is not in the ”allowed” list, you can’t access anything. I hope that this is not the path we will see.


Agreed. But talking in generalities like "the government should be allowed to mandate a feature" leads to silly arguments like "government can't mandate airbags." We should be having the discussion about what the goal is, what the mandate would be, and what the side effects could be. Otherwise the conversation is too high level to mean anything.


How to verify that device is not faking the age? I bet here comes the remote attestation…


I think this is more of a liability thing. If the parent set the age as underage and the kid does a bunch of stuff to circumvent that, it’s on the kid and parent and not the website.




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